Five Steps to becoming Free of Pain:

Becoming aware of the underlying causes of stress in one’s life emotional and physical which causes the soft tissue to spasm.The emotional and physical Type equation here.

Re-educating the client’s basic movement patterns: how he sits at his desk, how long he remains there without moving, how he walks and so on. The goal is to re-educate the client to move with better alignment, putting less stress on the back, staying relaxed and allowing the soft tissue to stay healthy.

Homework… A short routine of stretches and self massage.

By the way, it’s not only people with spine problems who come to me. Not long ago, a man came to me with bad knee pain and he had been diagnosed by an osteopath as having insufficient cartilage at the knee joint, where the femur, the upper leg bone, connects with the tibia, the lower leg bone. The osteopath had tried several treatments, none of which worked, then told his client, “You’re gonna have to live with this.” Physical therapy didn’t help, either.

I looked at the affected leg and noticed that it was extremely out of alignment, with the upper leg rotating inward at the hip, forcing the lower leg to rotate outwards in order to maintain balance – in the trade, we call this an ‘x leg,’ because if you put two of them together, it forms an ‘x’ shape.

When he bent his knee forward, it did not go over his foot at all, so he had to little support from his lower leg, which put severe tension on the knee joint. I said, “The first thing I’m going to try is to explore the soft tissue contraction in the knee and the soft tissue that is effecting the knee.

I found a lot of holding in his upper leg and the muscles of the back of the leg. Along with hard dry tissue painful to touch in the knee. So we worked for 6 sessions which resulted in a pain free knee. Pretty soon, he was able to dance again – he loved to do the salsa – and could even run without difficulty.

Last time I saw him, he was 100 percent better and functioning normally.

These case histories invite an important question: why is this kind of work so much overlooked by conventional medicine? As I see it, the medical profession focuses on small areas of the body, localizing the problem; it’s a reductionist approach, for example, reducing the problem to a knee, without bothering to look at the whole body structure in relation to the affected area.

So a doctor may look at the knee and say, “Well, clearly there is inflammation in the knee, so the logical solution is to prescribe anti-inflammatory drugs,” or if this does not help he will send the patient to a physical therapist.

I often see clients who have tried all the conventional approaches and after a few sessions with me they feel “much better”.

About the author

Satyarthi Peloquin

Satyarthi Dylan Peloquin has been a professional bodyworker for over 42 years. Over the past 33 years, he has trained and taught over 3,000 people worldwide, many of whom are now full-time bodyworkers and / or teachers of various methods of bodywork.